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THE ALTAR OF FREEDOM

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

THE ALTAR OF FREEDOM

And even now, all over the country, on this bright spring day, there are mothers who are waiting to know what they must do. Mothers who are facing the day with heads up and shoulders back, ready to stand steady when the blow falls; mothers who shrink and tremble, but ready, too; and other mothers, who cannot find the strength to give up to the service of their country the boys who will always be little boys to them.

I love my country. There is nothing she can ask that I will not do. I am ready to live for her or die for her. Last stand of the humanities on earth, realization of a dream and fulfillment of an ideal, my home, my native land,--that is America to me. Because I am a woman, I cannot die for my country, but I am doing a far harder thing.

I am giving a son to the service of his country, the land he loves.

When I was a child, I lived on a quiet, tree-shaded street in this very city where now I am writing this. And, late in May of each year, when the ailanthus trees were in blossom, the street put up fresh curtains and red-washed the brick pavements. The cobblestones were swept, too. And then the procession came.

I was twelve, I think, before I began to get a lump in my throat as the long line of veterans went by. It was a long line then. I did not know exactly why I cried, except that those men and those tattered flags stood for something heroic and very sad. I know now, but it has taken years to put it into words, and in those years the line has shortened to a handful. Even the one-armed drummer has gone now. The street, which was rough and hard to march on in those days, has been made smooth for their feet, but few are left who can march to that quiet God's-acre on the hill above.

Now I know why, as a child, I wept. Those men had fought for something that was a part of me, like my mother, or my home: for my country.

Many years later I again saw marching men. But now the men were young, and there were no flags and no drums. They were marching into battle. And they were not fighting for my country.

But they were fighting for the ideal on which my country was founded, for humanity against oppression and cruelty, for the right of a man to labor in his own field, for the principle that honor is greater than life.

I saw them living and fighting, and I saw them dying. I saw strange nations, men of different tongues and different colors, gathered together and becoming as one, against a common foe. And then I learned this: that the world is now but one great nation, drawn close by the creed that all men are brothers; and that in the midst of that great nation of the world had broken loose something terrible, something that must be killed, or the world dies.

Once over there I saw a boy dying in a railway station. He knew two English words, so he said:--

"All right. All right."

It was all right with him. He had done his bit, and he knew that there were others to take his place, and that the world-nation would not rest until the war-beast was chained. It was "all right."

And so now, on the brink of war, I know it is all right with us.

We have been the melting-pot, but under the pot there has been no fire. Now the fire has come, a white flame, and we will fuse at last. But it will burn and sear. And to that, I wonder, can we say, "All right"?

War is a great adventure, the greatest adventure in the world. The adventurers go forth to battle, eyes ahead. Mostly they are boys who go, because war is the young man's game, the young man's call. All over Europe boys have left their homes, with a shame-faced tear or two, perhaps, but with the great adventure ahead. And they have left at home a great emptiness, a quiet that is not peace.

Then,--and very suddenly,--they have ceased to be boys on a great adventure, and are men, fighting men, patriots and soldiers. Something that had always been theirs had become a thing that had to be fought for. Not until it was menaced had they known how dear was their country. The flag had been but a flag. It became a symbol of home.

I have lived to see my country's flag beside the altar of my church.

Men fight wars, but it is the mothers of a nation who raise the army. They are the silent patriots. Given her will, every mother in this great land would go to war, if by so doing she could keep her sons in safety. It is easier to go than to send a boy.

Yet war is not necessarily death. I try to comfort myself with this. Perhaps it will help other mothers. It is a hazard, but it is a thing of vast rewards and much cheerfulness, of democracy, of big moments and little feasts, of smiles and grumbling, of labor and rest, and of that joy in his own kind that only the boy knows. And underneath it all, buried deep and never articulate, is that feeling of doing his bit for his country, which is the foundation on which a nation rests secure.

I wish I could always remember these things. I have panicky times, when the sun dies for me, and my world goes black. But I am like the other mothers. I shall go through with it, and I would not have things otherwise. I would not have my son do other than he is doing. He is still in his 'teens, but he is a man, and this is his country. I have not raised him to be a shirker.

Only--this is a matter for everybody. It is not my war, or his, or the war of those other college boys who are always the first to go. Just as we all benefit by the country, so must we share--and share alike--its dangers.

Unless it is your war, this is not a democracy. If, as in the past, we have allowed the few to do our political thinking for us, as even now in the churches the few earn for all of us the right to call this a Christian land, if in this war we allow the few to fight for us, then as a nation we have died and our ideals have died with us. Though we win, if all have not borne this burden alike, then do we lose.

Sometimes, in these last troubled days, when every newsboy on the street under my window has been crying War, I cover my eyes and see that gallant little first army of England, springing to the call, and facing, without hope, the great trained German army. It was the best England had, and it is gone, almost to a man--because the mothers of England had not insisted that every man in the empire bear his share.

What if now your boy and mine could be a part of a vast trained army? His chance would be better. Better? There would be no war. You and I, trembling for what may come, are paying the price of not having risen, an army of women, and demanded what now may come too late.

Because we did not rise this situation confronts us. For this is what a volunteer army means in this country to-day. For every high-spirited lad like yours and mine who goes out to fight, there are a hundred, a thousand, men of fighting age and strength who will not go, men who have no country, but only a refuge from the oppression of Europe.

Are we to suffer that they may live? Is this liberty of ours, this Land of the Free, without price? And will those hold it dear whom it has cost nothing?

Yet, so great is my faith in this great nation, so sure am I that the principles on which it is built are enduring, that I believe all these things will be set right in time. The one thing that matters now is to do our part, to show to the world that America still believes that there is such a thing as honor, and such a word as right.

For--and this I believe as I do in my country--we are to end this war. And that is the greatest privilege a nation of the world may have. We have sat by, through such horrors as have turned the world to blood. But now we can come in our strength, and mighty strength it will be. So rich we are! So strong! So young!

And the enemy is old--jaded and crafty and old: as old as cruelty is old. We are young and tireless and unafraid.

I have seen a sixteen-year-old Belgian sentinel keeping watch over a part of the German army, and all its science was powerless against his keen young eyes.

But we must pay the price. And the cost falls heaviest on the women.

No woman has the right to hold her son back if he desires to go to war. It is the fruition of the years in which she sought to make him a man. It is the vindication of his manhood. It is the crystallization of those very ideals which she taught him with his prayers.

I decline to believe that there are mothers who will not let their boys strike back when they are attacked.

But it is hard. Always the relation between mother and son is very close. As the boy grows up, the mother faces this, that he needs more than she can give him. He is still her world, but she is no longer his. Life calls, work and play and love, and sometimes battle. And the mother cannot hold him.

Everywhere are mothers, women who have patched small garments and tied up little wounds, who have built up a house of life out of millions of loving services, whose world has been the four walls of home.

To such women comes the call for their sons, who are still to them, though men grown, but the little boys of the stockings, and the small wounds, and Christmas trees, and the Fourth of July.

I do not fear for these women, but we cannot minimize what they do. They will send their sons, because they know that a nation is but a great home, consisting of many small ones. Homes are the units of a nation, as men are of an army. And these women know that our homes are only safe so long as the country is. They know too that peace has fled from the earth and cannot be brought back but by God and the sword.

Perhaps my own experience will be helpful. I am a home-woman, although now and then my profession has called me to strange places. Our family life has been very close. And, while I have little fear for myself, I am a coward for my children.

When, some weeks ago, war began to come close, I weakened, and I wrote my oldest son a letter. I was willing to have him do his duty, but I asked him to wait. Womanlike, I wanted time. I felt that surely this cross was not for me to bear so soon.

Then,--and may he forgive me for telling this, because of its purpose,--after a day or two, he wired, asking his father and myself if we wanted him to be a quitter.

I came to my senses then, and the necessary permission to enlist was signed and sent. Then I sat down and wrote to him, and said we would stand squarely behind him in whatever he did.

Easy? It was the hardest thing I have ever done. But I am glad now. I would never have forgiven him, I think, had he failed his country. But I nearly failed him.

So I have given one son, and I stand ready to give my other two, if their country needs them, when they are old enough to go.

But I am finding some things to cheer me. There is, for instance, the knowledge that the scandals of the Southern camps during the Spanish War will not be repeated. There we lost ten boys from disease to every one killed in battle. Think of it! We learned nothing from that war, but we have learned greatly from the war in Europe. There will be no cruel and useless waste of life from disease. On the Mexican border there was practically no sickness, although the natural conditions were in favor of it. We have sanitarians, now, and water supplies will be watched. The inoculation against typhoid, too, has eliminated the disease, both in the European armies and here. Because it is waste that we fear.

We are trying to feel, we women, that no cost is too great, if needful to preserve our country. But we will never be reconciled to waste of life through negligence. And this I promise, now. Let such negligence occur, and let me know of it, duly investigated, and I will make the press of the country ring with it, to the eternal shame of those who are responsible.

I have been to war, and I know this: that men living in fearful surroundings may be kept healthy by proper care. This care is what we demand, those of us who cannot fight, but who are bearing our own burdens, nevertheless.

One or two things have helped to make our decision hard for us. Perhaps the most important is this: there is no great hatred of the enemy, however much we abominate the things the German Government has driven an acquiescent people into doing. We all know Germans here whom we like and respect. We see them, family folk, sober and industrious and God-fearing, all about us. They are not Huns or vandals. And all the knowledge we have of a nation gone mad to order hardly counteracts the effect of the friendly human contacts of our daily lives with the Germans we know.

We forget that the German we know has come here to escape the very thing that has wrecked the old world; that in coming to this land of the free he has followed an ideal as steadily as back in the fatherland his kindred are following after the false gods of hate and war.

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